


Toast

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [16]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 19:38:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6821413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toast and Angharad reach a cease-fire agreement, early on in the Vault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toast

The first thirty days she was in the Vault after her ‘wedding’, she thought she would never understand these Wives. Angharad, so haughty and gold, the Dag who carved hidden words into her fingers, fire-crowned Capable with unbearable love in her eyes. Capable was the first to reach out to her, to ask where she came from. 

“ _Family_?” Toast spat out the word like it was a bad taste. “Sure, I had family. We were a great band, until the War Boys ran us down. Then they left me behind like so much useless _scrap_.”

“I’m sorry,” Capable said, started to say. 

“It doesn’t _matter_ ,” Toast said, though Tarl grumbled loud enough for her to hear it, a wordless protest. He had never liked leaving, or being left. “That’s just what happens. Everyone gets left.”

That didn’t really help her live here, in this Vault, under the glass dome like a bug she’d once trapped under clear plastic for Tarl to look at. He’d said it was the ugliest looking beetle he’d ever seen, and then she’d scooped it up for Jam, who’d told her to stop playing with her food. She wanted to say that to Joe, the next time he came demanding music and softness and fragility from his Wives. 

She didn’t, though. She was afraid he might make her into food. 

It was Tarl that made the days bearable, who put his head on her knee and stuck his tongue out to make her smile, who hummed her to sleep and walked up and down her back to loosen the muscles there. At least they had left her her daemon. With him by her side, she was still Toast. She was still herself, and no one else.

“Look, we’re not trying to hurt you,” Angharad said one day, a hundred days later. “We all live here, in this place. It would be nice if you would talk to us.” 

“What do you want me to say?” Toast asked, her voice bone-dry, full of the sullen, glowering sweetness Joe pulled from her. 

“Not like _that_ ,” Angharad snapped, so full of outrage that Toast almost believed her. “I want to talk with _you_. Toast.”

“Tell us how you got your name,” Adara suggested, doing her best to appear welcoming and not a lioness. Not so dangerous as she really was. 

Toast looked at them with all the disdain she could muster, long braids swinging slowly across her face. “How did _you_ get _your_ name?” she asked back, because Angharad was as unusual as any other name in the Wasteland.

“My mother gave it to me,” Angharad said, her lips twisting down into something not quite a smile. “She died when I was a close to five thousand days old.”

Toast hadn’t thought she would feel sympathy, or softness, around any of the Wives. They had been here before her, who knew how long, in this water-soft place. The horrors they faced were the same as her own, no greater or lesser. But she bit her tongue swallowing her first answer to that, and looked at Tarl instead. If they had had a mother, she was long gone now.

“I don’t know who gave me my name,” she said at last. “Our band didn’t have mothers, not really. I was the only kid who survived the first thousand days, so I just…belonged to all of them.” Toast told herself for the thousandth time she didn’t miss them. 

“A family,” Adara said, and she sounded…jealous. Or, not jealous, but longing. Like some part of what Toast had had was worth having. Toast looked sharply at the daemon, who only looked back, unblinking. 

“It would have been nice to have people to look out for you,” Angharad agreed, but she was _not_ looking at Toast and was instead running fingers through the ends of her gold hair, smoothing out the tangles. “I’m sorry you lost it.”

Toast shook her head, unable to answer. For once meanness was not at the tip of her tongue. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” she said at last, a pale repetition of what she’d been saying for the past hundred days. “We’re here now.”

“Yes,” Adara said, her lips curling into a snarl. Angharad’s expression mirrored her daemon’s. “We’re here.”

**Author's Note:**

> So I looked back over my works and found a distinct lack of Toast-centric stories. Since I had so many Capable/Angharad ones, and even ones focussing on Cheedo and the Dag, I decided there was a need to fix things.
> 
> yay racism. check your privilege every day folks.


End file.
